Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

From the reporter who was there at the very beginning comes the revealing inside story of the partnership between Steve Bannon and Donald Trump - the key to understanding the rise of the alt-right, the fall of Hillary Clinton, and the hidden forces that drove the greatest upset in American political history.

The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election

In April 2016, computer technicians at the Democratic National Committee discovered that someone had accessed the organization's computer servers and conducted a theft that is best described as Watergate 2.0. In the weeks that followed, the nation's top computer security experts discovered that the cyber thieves had helped themselves to everything: sensitive documents, emails, donor information, even voice mails.

Richard Nixon: The Life

Richard Nixon opens with young navy lieutenant "Nick" Nixon returning from the Pacific and setting his cap at Congress, an idealistic dreamer seeking to build a better world. Yet amid the turns of that now legendary 1946 campaign, Nixon's finer attributes quickly gave way to unapologetic ruthlessness. It is a stunning overture to John A. Farrell's magisterial portrait of a man who embodied postwar American cynicism.

Why were no bankers put in prison after the financial crisis of 2008? Why do CEOs seem to commit wrongdoing with impunity? The problem goes beyond banks deemed "too big to fail" to almost every large corporation in America - to pharmaceutical companies and auto manufacturers and beyond. The Chickenshit Club - an inside reference to prosecutors too scared of failure and too daunted by legal impediments to do their jobs - explains why.

Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam

By January 1968, despite an influx of half a million American troops, the fighting in Vietnam seemed to be at a stalemate. Yet General William Westmoreland, commander of American forces, announced a new phase of the war in which "the end begins to come into view". The North Vietnamese had different ideas. In mid-1967, the leadership in Hanoi had started planning an offensive intended to win the war in a single stroke.

Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

In the 1950s a young Indianapolis minister named Jim Jones preached a curious blend of the Gospel and Marxism. His congregation was racially integrated, and he was a much-lauded leader in the contemporary civil rights movement. Eventually Jones moved his church, Peoples Temple, to Northern California. He became involved in electoral politics and soon was a prominent Bay Area leader.

Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?

War with China is much more likely than anyone thinks. When Athens went to war with Sparta some 2,500 years ago, the Greek historian Thucydides identified one simple cause: A rising power threatened to displace a ruling one. As the eminent Harvard scholar Graham Allison explains, in the past 500 years, great powers have found themselves in "Thucydides's Trap" 16 times. In 12 of the 16, the results have been catastrophic.

America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History

From the end of World War II until 1980, virtually no American soldiers were killed in action while serving in the Greater Middle East. Since 1990, virtually no American soldiers have been killed in action anywhere else. What caused this shift? Andrew J. Bacevich, one of the country's most respected voices on foreign affairs, offers an incisive critical history of this ongoing military enterprise - now more than 30 years old and with no end in sight.

Caught in the Revolution: Petrograd, Russia, 1917 - a World on the Edge

From the New York Times best-selling author of The Romanov Sisters, Caught in the Revolution is Helen Rappaport's masterful telling of the outbreak of the Russian Revolution through eyewitness accounts left by foreign nationals who saw the drama unfold.

Major revelations about the US government's drone program - best-selling author Jeremy Scahill and his colleagues at the investigative website The Intercept expose stunning new details about America's secret assassination policy.

October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

The renowned fantasy and science fiction writer China Mieville has long been inspired by the ideals of the Russian Revolution, and here, on the centenary of the revolution, he provides his own distinctive take on its history. In February 1917, in the midst of bloody war, Russia was still an autocratic monarchy: nine months later it became the first socialist state in world history. How did this unimaginable transformation take place? How was a ravaged and backward country, swept up in a desperately unpopular war, rocked by not one but two revolutions?

The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq

The Assassins' Gate, so dubbed by American soldiers, is the entrance to the American zone in the city of Baghdad. In 2003, the United States blazed into Iraq to depose dictator Saddam Hussein. But after three years and unknown thousands killed, that country faces an escalating civil war and an uncertain fate. How did it get to this point?

Power Wars: Inside Obama's Post-9/11 Presidency

Barack Obama campaigned on a promise of change from George W. Bush's "global war on terror". Yet from indefinite detention and drone strikes to surveillance and military tribunals, Obama ended up continuing - and in some cases expanding - many policies he inherited. What happened? In Power Wars, Charlie Savage looks inside the Obama administration's national security legal and policy team in a way that no one has before.

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

Why is America living in an age of profound economic inequality? Why, despite the desperate need to address climate change, have even modest environmental efforts been defeated again and again? Why have protections for employees been decimated? Why do hedge-fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middle-class workers? The conventional answer is that a popular uprising against "big government" led to the rise of a broad-based conservative movement.

Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq

Unimpeachably sourced, Cobra II describes how the American rush to Baghdad provided the opportunity for the virulent insurgency that followed. The brutal aftermath in Iraq was not inevitable and was a surprise to the generals on both sides; Cobra II provides the first authoritative account as to why. It is a book of enduring importance and incisive analysis, a comprehensive account of the most reported yet least understood war in American history.

The Terror Years: From al-Qaeda to the Islamic State

With the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright became generally acknowledged as one of our major journalists writing on terrorism in the Middle East. This collection draws on several articles he wrote while researching that book as well as many that he's written since, following where and how al-Qaeda and its core cultlike beliefs have morphed and spread.

The Russian Revolution: A New History

Historian Sean McMeekin traces the events that ended Romanov rule, ushered the Bolsheviks into power, and introduced communism to the world. Between 1917 and 1922, Russia underwent a complete and irreversible transformation. Taking advantage of the collapse of the Tsarist regime in the middle of World War I, the Bolsheviks staged a hostile takeover of the Russian Imperial Army, promoting mutinies and mass desertions of men in order to fulfill Lenin's program of turning the "imperialist war" into civil war.

Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

It was never supposed to be this close. And of course she was supposed to win. How Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump is the tragic story of a sure thing gone off the rails. For every Comey revelation or hindsight acknowledgment about the electorate, no explanation of defeat can begin with anything other than the core problem of Hillary's campaign - the candidate herself.

Enemies: A History of the FBI

We think of the FBI as America’s police force. But secret intelligence is the Bureau’s first and foremost mission. Enemies is the story of how presidents have used the FBI as the most formidable intelligence force in American history. This is the first definitive history of the FBI’s secret intelligence operations, from an author whose work on the Pentagon and the CIA won him the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the 20th century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.

The Case for Impeachment

In The Case for Impeachment, distinguished professor of history at American University Allan J. Lichtman illuminates exactly how the impeachment of President Trump might work by showing how his actions - past or future - make him uniquely vulnerable to impeachment proceedings. From his dealings with Russia to his conflicts of interest at home and abroad to the numerous civil suits involving him, Lichtman zeroes in on Mr. Trump's key areas of weakness.

Al Franken, Giant of the Senate

Al Franken, Giant of the Senate is a book about an unlikely campaign that had an even more improbable ending: the closest outcome in history and an unprecedented eight-month recount saga, which is pretty funny in retrospect. It's a book about what happens when the nation's foremost progressive satirist gets a chance to serve in the United States Senate and, defying the low expectations of the pundit class, actually turns out to be good at it.

The Killing Zone: My Life in the Vietnam War

Among the best books ever written about men in combat, The Killing Zone tells the story of the platoon of Delta One-six, capturing what it meant to face lethal danger, to follow orders, and to search for the conviction and then the hope that this war was worth the sacrifice. The book includes a new chapter on what happened to the platoon members when they came home.

Publisher's Summary

What was really behind the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq? As George W. Bush steered the nation to war, who spoke the truth and who tried to hide it?

This fast-paced, behind-the-scenes narrative tells the inside story of how the Bush administration used bad intelligence to sell and then justify the Iraq war. Veteran reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn take the reader behind the scenes at the White House, the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, and in Congress, where controversial decisions and turf battles were fought in and with the highest circles of the Bush administration.

Hubris connects the dots between George W. Bush's determination to get rid of Saddam Hussein, the role of neoconservatives in pushing the case for war, and the outing of a CIA officer, which led to the indictment of a top White House official. It's a news-making account of conspiracy, backstabbing, ineptitude, and, perhaps most especially, arrogance.

What the Critics Say

Audie Award Finalist, Judges' Award: Politics, 2007

"Many critics of the Iraq War have highlighted the ideological drive behind the invasion. Fewer have grappled with the more complex question of why it was impossible for skeptics, doubters, and more scrupulous analysts to stop it. Isikoff and Corn enable us to understand better how this devastating policy tragedy played out." (The Washington Post's Book World)

As I read more about the Iraq War and how President Bush and his administration tried to sell the public that we needed to go to war, "Hubris" was a upsetting read. It is not because the book was poorly written, but it just made me upset how much false advertising there was at supporting this war.

The White House made us all gullible at supporting something that wasn't there in the first place. It just makes you wonder on how many other wars wasn't necessary to march to.

It is illegal to shout out fire in a crowded theater as a joke. George W. Bush pretty much hoaxed the entire world on the Iraq War.

Having just listened to "Legacy Of Ashes", I was quite pleased to see that narrator Stefan Rudnicki had a part in this new work.

Starting from the reference point of the history of the CIA as described in "Legacy", this book is a fascinating look at how the work of the men and women of the CIA is handled at the top levels of government.

I must most strongly recommend that both of these books be studied together, as the problems of the intelligence-gathering process preface the events as depicted in this book.

The information as presented is vital to understand the events of the last ten years; whether one is liberal or conservative is or no consequence when it comes to enjoying this book.

The powerfully written account of the behind-the-scenes decision making leading up to and controlling the Iraq war is essential reading for anyone wishing to get a better understanding of the issues around Iraq.
The authors are incredibly comprehensive in the fact finding and explanation of the intelligence data provided to the key players within the White House and the decisions made with this information.
In addition, the narrator is as always, excellent.
I would highly recommend this book.

The narrator was really very good. He took what is a very touchy subject for many people and made it, not necessarily enjoyable, but at least possible to listen to.

What was the most compelling aspect of this narrative?

The most compelling part was the fact that even though I lived through this, watched high school friends go to war (some of them not coming back) and followed the news with a fair amount of regularity, there was so much I did not know. There was so much of the story of intelligence errors, redundancy, and secrecy (even between allies) that we were able to go to war on facts the intelligence community KNEW was wrong. It is disheartening to hear from an ethical standpoint, this was the first war we were engaged in where we were not attacked first (Vietnam still technically being considered a conflict), and from the viewpoint of someone who has always respected the intelligence forces of our country.

What does Stefan Rudnicki bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

Stefan Rudnicki was able to get me through the book. I had purchased it for my Kindle and was unable to even get into the third chapter because I would get so angry.

This is probably the most detailed book on the white house's deception for starting the Iraq war. Aptly named.

It really shows you that it didn't matter what the REAL evidence was, the neo-cons that took power had decided on war and WMDs were just the most convenient excuse. If they had never existed, another excuse (Gulf-of-Tomkin like) would have been created (as the book will describe).

This isn't bad for those who haven't read/heard "State of Denial" or that book written by Richard Clark, (and one or two others), but for those who have, this will read like an amalgamation of all the other 9/11 and Iraq books. Currently listening to Tenet's book, and so far, Tenet's writing is pedestrian at best, sloppy at worst.